When I need some category of app - say a note app or an audiobook player - I generally check F-Droid first.
If there's a good enough app on there, I generally stick with that as opposed to trying what Google Play has to offer.
I like having that prefiltering, knowing that the app will be open source, not trying to pull anything shady and not have ads or sell my data. On the Play Store, more often than not, at least one of those is not true.
You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards.
It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
> Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit.
And as a drunk, who got to this stage in the aftermath of WW3, which was definitely not post-scarcity at this point because of how hard it was to "scrounge together enough titanium for the cockpit".
And immediately after the test flight, some pointy-eared vegetarian space Buddhists landed and said hi.
> It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
TOS is very much "space is an ocean". NCC-1701 is very obviously a shoe-in for CVN-65, the "colonies" and other locations they visit are scaled more like Pacific islands than planets, the episode with Romulan cloaking device is classic submarine warfare filmography including getting people to be quiet (so the space sonar wouldn't pick them up?)
TNG kept a lot of this, but was also "families on board" from the get-go.
I'm not sure I want to argue how a fictional universe's fictional history is arranged.
I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity.
You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else.
Your theory is contrary to the evidence of history. Technological progress makes people more free, not less. 500 years ago, you would have been a serf and your life would be literally worthless. In much of the undeveloped world, that’s still true.
The industrial revolution begot the labor movement, which is what caused greater freedom.
It could do that because of the dependence on labor for production, or in other words leverage over the ownership class.
If we accelerate technology to the point where we sever this dependency, all those freedoms will no longer have the leverage required to extract them. Our lives didn't become not worthless because of the steam machine. They became not worthless because of leverage over capital reproduction, and once that's gone they may well become worthless again.
Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those.
I think you're both right in different ways. Some labour movements were not dependent on technological advancement. Some technological advancements materially and independently improved the lives of people. The contraceptive pill gave women much greater control over the timing of pregnancy. [Its diffusion substantially affected women's investment in professional careers and the timing of marriage.](https://www.nber.org/papers/w7527) Medical and reproductive technologies played an important role in increasing married women's ability to participate in paid work. Those are changes in actual individual choice brought about, in significant part, by technology.
However if we circle back to your original comment that social change (and I'm reading that as some form of communism) is required before technology delivers material abundance, then I feel compelled to remind you that the last 37 times humanity attempted this, it failed so spectacularly that 100+ million people died. I think it's clear that whatever the nuance of this discussion, communism (or whatever aphorism you prefer) is incompatible with scarce resources. I therefore argue that the abundance must come first.
So I think abundance completely changes the game and I think we can all agree on that.
I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
Labor will no longer be required for their productive needs, so that handful of people that controls the abundance machines will no longer have any incentive to keep the rest of humanity satisfied, or even alive for that matter.
In other words, if we don't change social relations before we get to this state, we will end up in a world where the Musks, Bezos and Zucks of this world control all material production, with the rest of us reduced to being dependent on their charity.
Personally, that sounds like the worst dystopia imaginable.
I will give you that prior attempts at socialism weren't necessarily successful and a lot of people died, however, I also think that argument requires holding one eye shut.
People are dying from capitalism right now. There's a homeless guy in SoMa that is breathing his last breath as we speak. There's entire villages in Africa that can't afford clean water while Nestle sells it in plastic bottles that pollute our planet. The status quo is not without its own violence and I think that is a point that too often gets swept under the rug.
Either way though, I think even if I were to concede that capitalism historically had better outcomes (which I have not been fully sold on! it's positives have just been more articulated imo, but that's another debate.), we are in a critical moment right now.
If we really believe we're to transition into a post-scarcity world, we need to make sure the right social relations are in place before that happens and whatever we have right now is locked in forever.
All criticism of socialism's supposed productive ineffectiveness becomes irrelevant once the transition is done anyways.
> I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
It's a valid concern. We use democracy right now to address inequality. Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources? To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all.
Perhaps this is more of a regional risk? There are some nations which culturally value individuality. I'm not sure the U.S. would build national abundance machines.
I think I broadly agree with your thesis, however. Abundance is going to force massive social change. If goods and services are effectively free, most jobs disappear. So too does their income and consumer demand, which destroys the entire premise of capitalism. You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about.
When Middle American manufacturing jobs were offshored to China, Hilary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." I fear many more people whose jobs are lost to AI will be met with similar derision. It is only when things get very bad that change will occur. The Star Trek timeline describes this collapse between 2020s-2053.
> Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources?
Even though I'm not too concerned about that specifically, that is clearly a plan they have. [0]
> To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all.
I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs.
> You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about.
I, too, am worried about the transition, but for different reasons. I believe Elon when he says he believes capitalism will end in a few decades. However, I don't think he has prosperity for all in mind and that end state won't just naturally happen by itself.
I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity.
That, to me, is the core transition risk we need to manage. We need to make sure abundance machines aren't just a device for completely centralizing power in the hands of a few.
> I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs.
I understand. I place less weight into this risk. The current AI supply chain is so globally interdependent that it has effectively distributed itself beyond centralised control. China has received the full weight of global chip sanctions and still somehow manages to provide competitive coding models using either grey imports, offshore cloud compute, or locally produced chips. It would be very difficult (and I would argue almost impossible) for a nation and especially an individual/company to seize ownership of the entire supply chain and prevent everyone else in the world from producing their own AI/chips/abundance machines.
> I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity.
No doubt many people in positions of power are megalomaniacs. This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders.
> This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders.
I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership.
You see both of these in action right now. Think of Elon Musk actively defying Brazilian rule of law [0] or him literally being put into a position where he can neuter the institutions designed to hold him democratically accountable with the DOGE appointment.
To quote MLK - "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."
I think fundamentally one cannot disentangle democratic control of political power from democratic control of the economy, because economic power can be converted into political power and as long as we let economic power concentrate in the hands of a few unelected oligarchs, they will continue to use it to exert political power as well.
> I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership.
I agree there is a risk, and I think defence of democracy should be at the forefront of fighting against the future you fear. I do not think the risk appears at the end of a gun. Rather, via propaganda and corruption. We know how effective propaganda can be, starting with Goebbels and all the way through to social media today. The problem here is that there is no clearly defined solution. Some people prescribe state control of information, which has historically resulted in catastrophic outcomes. Some people prescribe uncensored information to the greatest degree possible, and to the degree we have that today, it's also not working out very well. Perhaps this will be the great question of our time.
For the record, re DOGE, I see that as the people getting what they voted for. Musk campaigned clearly on his intended actions, and for better or worse, a plurality of voters voted for that. We should be careful not to criticise democracy just because voters chose a different direction. However I think this is partly influenced by what I describe above.
> And 30 years ago you could still afford a house.
It is the people, who had build houses 30 years ago, and who set a price for those houses. Then came the government and start to regulate, redistribute, optimize and improve housing. And We live with the results.
Are you really going to keep on trying to defend the notion that the human society portrayed in Star Trek is not socialist? (In The Next Generation, no human investors, traders or financiers are ever depicted, and human society did away with money. Socialist countries have militaries, too.)
The proper reply to the parent of your comment IMHO is that Star Trek is evil propaganda, not that the vision of society depicted in the propaganda is not socialist.
That’s not what I said. I said that the human society portrayed in Star Trek had warp drive before it had socialism. Viewed charitably, it reflects how society might plausibly be structured when technology renders questions of resource or capital allocation largely moot.
What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?
Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?
> It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world. So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it.
This in itself is not an argument. British Opium was selling like hotcakes in China, so surely people people must have had a general favorable impression if they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it?
I think in general, the 3 euro thing is fine. However, it seems like there should be exceptions.
I like to do some electronics as a hobby and learning project. I was gonna try to build a thing to make my old timey doorbell intercom smart with an esp32, an audio codec and a circuit to safely read the signals.
Lots of cheap little parts I would usually get on Aliexpress. A lot of them around 50 cents or so. Now, each of them has a 3 euro fee added to it. The cost of this project would go from like 25 to like 75 euros. That seems super unacceptable to me and like it discourages experimenting with electronics, and with that a type of innovation Europe should try to encourage instead.
So in theory, that would be fine as well. In reality though, the categories aren't coarse like "electronic component", they're more like "resistor, 10K, 1/4W, carbon film".
From this article [1] published by the European Commission:
> The 3 € fee is applied per declared item, where ‘item’ means each unit of a product that is declared on a separate line. Specifically, the Commission defines "item" as one or more goods in a consignment sharing the same tariff classification, description and, where applicable, origin.
Now, the type of declaration matters [2] - if you're filling an H1 (standard customs) then you pay per item but if you're filling an H6 (postal declaration) or an H7 (Courier or low-value consignment declaration) then you pay per category. So anyone saying that it's always one or the other is, at the very least, oversimplifying.
first of all, Europeans don't need American wages. 57k is comfortable middle class in Austria, especially if you have government subsidised housing.
as for the "only rented" part, again, at this level of low rent it does not matter. you're better off renting. And Europeans have actual pension systems, we are nowhere near as reliant on real estate always appreciating in value.
> Most urgent intervention required in the UK, IMO. We're choking to death on the cost of housing.
Every country in the Western world is. And it seriously hits our economies as well - when companies have to pay wages to match what landlords are asking of their employees, places like China with a massive oversupply of housing are far, far more competitive.
The fix is to let the companies who want to build, build. For some reason a lot of cities won't support new construction if a private company might make a profit on it.
Most private construction is dedicated to luxury condos because that's where the big money is. If you let the "market" decide on its own it will always decide on the most profitable items, even if that's not what is needed.
Building luxury condos help with housing market as well.
I don't think this is controversial (there are tons of studies that support the conclusion).
>>If you let the "market" decide on its own it will always decide on the most profitable items, even if that's not what is needed.
How do you define "not needed"? Businesses will build what they can sell - the very definition of needed.
The problem is that it's difficult to build. A lot of cheaper housing projects don't get build because some restrictions (like height, number of apartments, parking places) that are not necessary.
Most of the affordable rentals in my city and many others is luxury housing that was built ~100 years ago. They built lots of cheap housing back then too, but it was junk that was torn down a long time ago. The luxury stuff was built better and lasted.
The affordable housing from ~50 years ago was single family housing and is crazy expensive today.
We should be building lots of high density luxury condos today. Those are the affordable apartments of the future.
It's pretty well established that building luxury condos freeze up lots of other housing at different price points. The person who moves into the luxury condo had to come from somewhere. This video is a pretty good overview of how this works: https://youtu.be/rQW4W1_SJmc
Yes. The market is a great optimizer, sure, but the question is always what do you actually want to optimize for? And that might not always be the same optimization function as a market.
I'm sure it does, to some extent that is <100%. But the real limit in a city is land. If we want to use it efficiently, we should check what we want to optimize use of that resource for.
IMO, in Berlin the most lacking thing is the supply in affordable housing, so it makes sense to optimize for that directly instead of a side effect of some other optimization.
Why not build something like Alt-Erlaa? [0] [1]
Cities can just build stuff. And if private developers are not as incentivized to invest, that makes it cheaper for the city to do so itself. As somebody from Vienna, it's crazy to me this is even up for debate.
I am not sure how it is in Berlin. I haven't visited in a while. I think it's too general an assessment though.
In many cities the limit is not land but permits - both being permitted to build at all and then build high enough.
>>Cities can just build stuff. And if private developers are not as incentivized to invest, that makes it cheaper for the city to do so itself. As somebody from Vienna, it's crazy to me this is even up for debate.
I hear a lot of good things about housing in Vienna.
Are those city build apartments readily available for anyone? The problem with public housing when I am from is that it turns the city population into lucky few who get access and the rest who not only have to subsidize it but then need to buy on private market themselves.
The example here being that they would pay a lot more city tax, never own a home, and over a period of decades this would make rent prices go down.
If this is what people want, then it seems like the right solution. Short term the only change will be increased taxes and maybe a few lucky renters getting apartments with the number slowly increasing over years and years.
Which is pretty much the situation in Vienna (rents are low in Vienna, but for the 20% that get city-owned apartments the rents are very low. Quality is ... let's call it "very old", and there's no choice (can't move up if you have a kid, say). Then housing associations pay like 30% more but less than private. Private rents are about double city-owned apartments as they're called. Only way to become a city renter is to earn less than 58000 in a given year, then wait 5+ years).
I don't know what you're trying to achieve by comparing it to the total. It's not about the proportion of empty houses to full ones, it's about the proportion of empty houses and people with no house. The full ones are a problem already solved, there's no point in pulling that into the comparison.
We’ve established how many empty houses there are and how much further demand there will be, and guesstimated that with the current empty apartments, we can cover almost 6 years of the cities growth.
That is, if you do absolutely nothing but to force people to rent their homes.
Now in reality, we’ll do more than that. Both the government and public sector are and will continue to build houses. But those are just projections. The existing houses, well, exist. So let’s make sure we use them.
Whenever this argument comes up people get extremely defensive for no good reason whatever. It will make a significant impact to the housing market if we force stalled housing to become available. Sure, we can and must do more than just that, but why not start with the cheapest and easiest thing we can today? Because it’s someone’s private property and we can’t even demand they rent it out in a housing crisis????
Come on now. Stop the madness.
How many private investors will be willing to build any new houses in a city which just forcibly bought thousands of houses from someone else?
The government may (let us forget, for the sake of the argument, that all major parties in Germany are NIMBY in practice), but for what money? The forced buyout was not free, the German constitution won't allow for that. They may even be sentenced to pay the full market price. That alone will make Berlin bankrupt.
You talk as if there wasn't a historic example just next door for how well government buildout of apartments could work.
The City of Vienna was a place of misery and slums before their socialist party built out enormous amounts of high-quality housing stock, financed by high taxes on luxury goods.
It to this day tops global quality of live rankings as a result.
Vienna BUILT the stock, and I am all for Berlin building the stock themselves. That is both constructive and adds more units to the market. But it is also rare, as most others want to take instead of building. Try finding another example like Vienna, you won't. It is all take, take, take, take and preciously little make, make.
Die Linke is a heavily NIMBY party which just wants to change ownership of existing housing stock forcibly. That won't alleviate any pressure in a city that gains almost 20 thousand new inhabitants yearly.
Are you paying attention? The main plan of the Berlin Left is to expropriate existing housing stock. Given that this is Germany and they cannot just take someone's stuff without due compensation, this will put the city on the verge of bankruptcy if not over it, and they will have no money left to build anything even if they wanted to, which they don't, because any development baaaad.
BTW much of the earlier privatization was caused by the previous Berlin town halls spending on unsustainable boondoggles which almost bankrupted the city already. People have short memory. The city sold its remaining housing stock to pay for the spending spree of former mayor Klaus Wowereit.
You're losing track of your own argument. You just decried expropriation because they would chill private development.
I just demonstrated why that is not an issue, since public development produces better results anyways.
The chilling effect on private builders would be a plus with that context, since it would drive down costs for public buildouts.
Your point on expropriation costs is also oversimplifying things. The German constitution says that a price has to be found by weighing interests. Nowhere does it specify markets as the mechanism for doing so, nor the weighting of public interest vs that of the expropriated.
The German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has a long track record of making very conservative judgments, and everyone in Germany knows that. The possibility that it would sentence Berlin to compensate the owners in full is absolutely real.
Hence I don't believe that the Linke will even try. They will form a coalition government and agree behind closed doors that they will let this one simply slip; sorry, the Greens got cold feet.
If there's a good enough app on there, I generally stick with that as opposed to trying what Google Play has to offer.
I like having that prefiltering, knowing that the app will be open source, not trying to pull anything shady and not have ads or sell my data. On the Play Store, more often than not, at least one of those is not true.
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